How can I throw the quaffle with the player 1? The "how to play" section says "Player 1:/? key".

Sorry if it wasn't clear enough- it's the key that has the forward slash on it, which on my keyboard is '?' if you type it while pressing shift (you don't press shift to throw the quaffle).

On my keyboard it's directly to the left of the shift key, between shift and the .> key, which is the bat key. I hope that makes sense, but if not, you can always remap the controls by clicking the "Redefine Keys" button in the lower left corner of the main menu. Apparently some keyboards don't have those keys, which I didn't think about.

Again, thanks for trying to play the game, and sorry if anything was confusing. Hopefully this helps you out.

Sorry, I use an AZERTY keyboard, something standard in France. The forward slash is not on the same key than the question mark on this kind of keyboard. Please could you find a better default key? I will try your suggestion. Thanks.

It would be better if the "how to play" section took into account the changes of keys.

Sorry, I use an AZERTY keyboard, something standard in France. The forward slash is not on the same key than the question mark on this kind of keyboard. Please could you find a better default key? I will try your suggestion. Thanks.

Sure, in the future, I'll try to use keys that are more standard. But for the time being, that's why I added the ability to remap the keys to whatever you want them to be. Thanks again for trying it out.

Overall I think the game's strangely charming. There are quite a few rough edges in the presentation, but I think they've been pretty thoroughly discussed already so I won't add anything. (Rule of thumb: user interfaces are always harder to understand than their creators think they are.)

I only played single-player. Has anyone at all played two-player yet?

I'm always in favour of simplifying controls where possible. Would it work if 'bat' and 'throw' used the same button, so that you can only bat away the bludgers if you're not holding the quaffle? That doesn't seem unreasonable from a gameplay point-of-view.

Maybe you could stress that the game is "Quidditch One-on-One", and as such shouldn't be expected to have the same rules as normal Quidditch.

I'm always in favour of simplifying controls where possible. Would it work if 'bat' and 'throw' used the same button, so that you can only bat away the bludgers if you're not holding the quaffle? That doesn't seem unreasonable from a gameplay point-of-view.

But what if I am holding the quaffle and a bludger's coming my way? I would like to bat it away, not throw the Quaffle

Quidditch is definitely one of the things I most enjoy about the harry potter series. I never thought a computer game could be implemented that would be able to be nearly as fun as reading the quidditch games in the books.

My suggestions:-Could you implement some scrolling, so the map is a bit larger?

-I know it is Quidditch one-on-one, but, instead of just two players, have 2 teams, but you can switch between which player in your team that you can control (like soccer games), while the rest are AI controlled.-Get knocked back in the direction the bludger travels, further depending on bludger speed, if you get hit hard enough in the head you get knocked to the ground (and possibly knocked out, so you have one less player on your team (if you do have teams).-Hold down bludger button for power (like in worms with bazooka)-Hit opponents with bat-make snitch a lot harder to catch-Movement is awesome, keep it like it is.

Overall I think the game's strangely charming. There are quite a few rough edges in the presentation, but I think they've been pretty thoroughly discussed already so I won't add anything. (Rule of thumb: user interfaces are always harder to understand than their creators think they are.)

I only played single-player. Has anyone at all played two-player yet?

I'm always in favour of simplifying controls where possible. Would it work if 'bat' and 'throw' used the same button, so that you can only bat away the bludgers if you're not holding the quaffle? That doesn't seem unreasonable from a gameplay point-of-view.

Maybe you could stress that the game is "Quidditch One-on-One", and as such shouldn't be expected to have the same rules as normal Quidditch.

Simon

I thought about using a single bat/throw button, but I went with the same logic that ra4king arrived at- there are situations where you could do both but only want to do one, so I made them separate buttons. Forcing you to throw the quaffle before hitting the bludgers away defeats most of the purpose of hitting them at all, I think. Thanks for playing!

Quidditch is definitely one of the things I most enjoy about the harry potter series. I never thought a computer game could be implemented that would be able to be nearly as fun as reading the quidditch games in the books.

Heh, I can't tell whether you're saying the game is fun or not! Hopefully it is though.

My suggestions:-Could you implement some scrolling, so the map is a bit larger?

What's weird is that my original plan did have scrolling. Actually, if you look at the painting code, I have a boolean you can change so that the view is zoomed in just enough to keep both players visible instead of showing the whole field. It feels like a completely different game, and I recommend you try it (full disclosure- I added the quality control after that code, so it might not work right out of the box). In the end, my fundamental goal was to keep things simple, obvious, and fun, so I chose to show the whole field.

-I know it is Quidditch one-on-one, but, instead of just two players, have 2 teams, but you can switch between which player in your team that you can control (like soccer games), while the rest are AI controlled.

I thought about that as well, and that would definitely be in any updated version, but my simple AI is dumb enough that you'd just have a jumble of players all doing the same thing- there are definitely ways around that, but I went with the bare minimum I could accomplish instead of adding features I thought would be awesome that would keep me postponing the release.

-Get knocked back in the direction the bludger travels, further depending on bludger speed, if you get hit hard enough in the head you get knocked to the ground (and possibly knocked out, so you have one less player on your team (if you do have teams).

That's a really good idea, and not hard to implement. I probably should have gone that way instead, but my focus has shifted so I probably won't have time to add it to this version. Actually I also originally wanted to try to implement the Wronski feint so that players could hit the ground, but again, in the end I went with simplicity, so I had to cut a ton of features for time and sanity's sake. Maybe in the next version.

-Hold down bludger button for power (like in worms with bazooka)-Hit opponents with bat

Again, it's weird how much you're in my brain. Both of these features, along with the scrolling, were a part of my original idea- but simplicity won in the end. I had some short-lived grand schemes of having a penalty system where you could hit opponents with your bat, but you had a chance to be "seen by the ref", which would allow your opponent to shoot a foul. But, I wanted to keep things obvious and not confusing, so I scratched it and just allowed the players to push one another, not hit one another.

Yeah, I explained this above so I won't harp on it, but I probably should have made it harder to catch. I wanted to make sure the games didn't last too long and get boring, but maybe I overcompensated.

That's awesome to hear, as it's one of the things I was wondering about. I thought about making it so the left and right arrows controlled the angle of your broom and the up and down arrows controlled speed, but I thought that might be clumsy or confusing. Maybe in another version I could have that as an "advanced controls" option, maybe with the bonus that you could go faster if you used it (like choosing manual transmission in racing games).

Haha oh geez. That would be pretty awesome, but I've got quite a ways to go before I implement that! Maybe in addition to an artist, I also need an "online guy" to help with that stuff for the next version?

I'm glad I could help. It sounds like you could make two different versions - a quick, fun, small game, and a more complex game which would be harder to learn but in the long run be better. It is good to keep things simple. The game is fun, but after a while will become boring if there isn't enough variation and challenge.I had a look at your code, and added a camera that follows just player 1 and I think it's pretty fun! (don't try 2 player, it won't work well... haha )http://www.chaosreef.com/quidditch/quidditch.htmlI added some deltax and deltay when you get hit by the bludgers, but the direction is completely random because I couldn't be bothered reading through and finding out how the heading variable works.

Haha oh geez. That would be pretty awesome, but I've got quite a ways to go before I implement that! Maybe in addition to an artist, I also need an "online guy" to help with that stuff for the next version?

I'm glad I could help. It sounds like you could make two different versions - a quick, fun, small game, and a more complex game which would be harder to learn but in the long run be better. It is good to keep things simple. The game is fun, but after a while will become boring if there isn't enough variation and challenge.

That's a good point. I kept things simple because my target audience was a few girl friends who like Harry Potter but don't really ever play games, so almost every decision was made with the idea of simplicity. But compared to the 1300 views this thread received so far (I know that doesn't equal 1300 plays, but still), maybe I should add some more complicated gameplay to keep things interesting and replayable. I'll definitely keep that in mind for games I make in the future.

That's very cool, and I'm pretty thrilled that a stranger on the internet liked something I did enough to spend time on it. Seriously, thanks, what an awesome way to start the day! I wonder if you used any of the code I wrote for keeping both players on the screen (the if statement that I deactivated in paintComponent() but left in the code), or if you did it from scratch? It wouldn't have been hard to modify my code to only worry about one of the players, I don't think. Either way, very cool.

I added some deltax and deltay when you get hit by the bludgers, but the direction is completely random because I couldn't be bothered reading through and finding out how the heading variable works.

You probably could just get the bludger's current deltaX and deltaY (before it bounces off the player), then set the player's deltaX and deltaY based off that. But I like your effect, and I'll probably add it if I ever do come back to this.

Cool, I'll keep you posted. I have a ton of ideas for this, but I'm mostly hampered by my lack of art skills. So if an artist ever comes along, I'd be interested in coming back to this. I've got a lot on my plate at the moment, but in the future, this would be a fun project.

You probably could just get the bludger's current deltaX and deltaY (before it bounces off the player)

oops. I didn't see them lol

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Cool, I'll keep you posted. I have a ton of ideas for this, but I'm mostly hampered by my lack of art skills. So if an artist ever comes along, I'd be interested in coming back to this. I've got a lot on my plate at the moment, but in the future, this would be a fun project.